Usually, a pilot controls movement of an aircraft on the ground by acting on various controls (rudder pedals, control wheel, . . . ). In order to perform the desired movement, the pilot must handle those controls continuously, which represents a high workload.
Methods are thus known that seek to assist the pilot in managing the movement of an aircraft on the ground, the aircraft comprising at least one left main undercarriage and at least one right main undercarriage, each of which has wheels associated with torque application members. For this purpose, on the basis of a longitudinal acceleration setpoint and/or an angular speed setpoint generated by one or more controls, there is determined for each of the torque application members an individual torque setpoint for application to the associated wheel in such a manner that the individual torque setpoints together enable the aircraft to respond to the longitudinal acceleration setpoint and/or to the angular speed setpoint.
The pilot can thus manage the controls without worrying about the way in which the setpoint(s) is/are distributed in order to act on the movement of the aircraft. Nevertheless, in such methods, the longitudinal acceleration setpoint and/or the angular speed setpoint for the aircraft are approached as closely as possible with the help of a regulation loop that compares the longitudinal acceleration setpoint and/or the angular speed setpoint respectively with the real longitudinal acceleration and/or the real angular speed of the aircraft. However the regulation loop then covers numerous components and in particular all of the torque application members. In order to provide sufficiently fine control over each of the components covered within said loop, it is necessary to make use of complex control relationships. That drawback is made worse on an aircraft that is of large size.
Furthermore, such methods are found to be difficult to adapt from one aircraft configuration to another: merely as a result of changing configuration (an additional undercarriage, one wheel per undercarriage fitted with an additional torque application member, . . . ), all of the control relationships needed for distributing the longitudinal acceleration setpoint and/or the angular speed setpoint amongst each of the torque application members need to be recalculated.